README.md

About

Software should be intuitive, easy, and fun to use. Pilotfish is a user experience toolkit for web and application developers to build better user experiences.

Instead of re-writing these common user experience widgets for each platform over and over, pilotfish unifies this effort as a community driven project that pulls together the latest best practices in User Experience. Your users get a better experience, and you save time. See plugins for a list of the functionality you gain by using a User Experience Platform.

TL;DR: Pilotfish is bootstrap for User Experience, with a server-side platform too.

FAQ

Can't I just do this on my own?

Sure, most experienced developers have created experiences like the ones you see here, at least once. Do you want to keep doing that over and over again, or use well-tested, high quality interactions?

Isn't this what jQueryUI, MixPanel, KISSMetrics, etc. does?

There are a lot of overlapping tools in the space, but no cohesive platform.
Pilotfish aims to help with all aspects of User Experience (ultimately - we aren't there yet!),
Starting with product conception, through the application, to analytics. This means server side apis for data, javascript/css
widgets for the application, and a console for the owner to manage it all.
To get a view of how all these fit together, check out our view of the User Experience Landscape

Do I have to use your server for the plugins that need server-side support?

Pilotfish currently requires jQuery. We plan on supporting other frameworks soon. Let us know if you are interested in other frameworks, that will guide our priorities. The best way to do this is to file an issue. Pilotfish will not interfere with any other libraries.

That looks like a lot of functionality. Isn't the file huge?

Pilotfish uses a plugin driven architecture, so you only get the plugins you need. The pilotfish.min.js file is only 1.8K when minified/gzipped.

Why the name pilotfish?

A pilot fish is one of those little fish that hover around sharks and eat the parasites, creating a mutually beneficial relationship with the shark. Similarly, Pilotfish aims to work alongside your application to make it better.

Demo

Getting started

This code is still young. Want to try it anyway? To use pilotfish, first include the base pilotfish file, then any plugins that you want to use. Depending on the plugin, some extra configuration may be required.

Asynchrounous Implementation

We like fast pages, and you should to. Pilotfish was built to be loaded asynchronously, and to load it's plugins asynchronously. Put this code anywhere in your template